Monday, August 09, 2010

Nasrallah can't find his smoking gun

Hezbollah leader Nasrallah had his press conference today to present the evidence that it was the Israelis who were responsible for the assassination of PM Rafik Hariri He promised to provide 'definitive' proof of Israeli involvement and instead what he provided was proof of Israeli air reconnaissance over Lebanon.

Really – he did. Actually, there was no evidence provided that the actual photographs were taken by the Israelis but Nasrallah's word. I can't stop my eyerolling – so instead read the Lebanon Daily Star's recap:

Nasrallah disclosed that in 1997, the resistance intercepted Israeli transmissions from its aerial reconnaissance aircraft, and he aired a series of excerpts of this footage, predating Hariri’s February 14, 2005, killing.

The footage was divided into three sections: it covered extensive shots of the area between the St. George Club, where Hariri was killed by a truck bomb, and the late premier’s residence in Qoreitem, with repeated shots of turns in the road along Corniche al-Manara. Nasrallah said the footage indicated that the Israelis were likely studying methods of carrying out bombings and assassinations, since official motorcades slow down at such turns.

The footage included shots of what Nasrallah said was Hariri’s path to his vacation residence in Faqra, Kesrouan, as well as the city of Sidon, with a focus on the residence of his brother, Shafik. “And there are no Hizbullah centers or homes of officials in these areas,” he said.

Nasrallah added that the resistance had begun assembling the footage only in the last two years, from an accumulated store of material, and hadn’t had time to compile similar excerpts of Israeli reconnaissance around the areas frequented by other politicians who were assassinated in the wake of Hariri’s killing. “This isn’t definitive proof,” he said, “but it opens up new horizons for the investigations.” Nasrallah added that the aerial reconnaissance footage was necessarily incomplete, because the resistance was unable to crack some of its encoding. “Just because we don’t have footage of [a given location], doesn’t mean the Israelis didn’t take pictures of it,” he said.

And the Israeli kill kittens too – just ask Nasrallah. If he looks long enough he can probably scrounge around the Hezbollah archives for aerial photographs of kitten deaths and provide testimony from an accused Israeli spy who witnessed it too!